by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/08/22 20:02 -07:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2007/08/22/4519235.aspx
(Apologies to M. Night Shyamalan!)
So, another great shirt showed up at CafePress.com:
There is not a single bit of this shirt that I don't think rocks! :-)
Click on the shirt to buy it, etc.
Now of course people liked it, but when Simon Daniels saw it you know what he said, being a member of the Microsoft Typography team, right?
He wondered what font that was!
Here is a close-up of the text:
Or for those who speak code points:
U+0130 U+0020 U+015f U+00e9 U+00e8 U+0020 U+0111 U+00ea U+00e4 U+0111 U+0020 U+0137 U+00e9 U+00ff U+0161
Well, he didn't think it was Verdana given the y above that has an extra tail and the Verdana has an uppercase I with dot with serifs.
But it couldn't be Tahoma because of the comma bekow the K or the cedilla under the s didn't match.
It couldn't be Segoe because of serifs on the I that it has, and it looked a bit like Segoe UI except the various dots are round there, not square like on the shirt.
It couldn't be Humanist with its bigger downward curve in the lowercase a and the fact that its has no k with comma below.
And it couldn't be Frutiger given the different look of the comma below the k and the cedilla under the s.
I swear I thought it might be Calibri, but Carolyn set me straight -- the cedilla is different and the y has no extra tail.
Cambria, Candra, and Century also had their own differences -- the whole thing felt like one of those puzzles where you have to find what is different about each picture!
So here is the big attempt:
And even now no one has identified the font yet....
Does anyone out there have any thoughts on what font it might be? :-)
In any case, I love the shirt, it is very cool.
This post brought to you by ķ (U+0137, a.k.a. LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH CEDILLA)
# markp on Thursday, August 23, 2007 1:46 AM:
I wish I could say I got the joke (keys?), but it did remind me of this utf-8 design I posted a while back: http://intepid.com/2005-05-30/22.45/
# Raph Levien on Thursday, August 23, 2007 2:08 AM:
I think it's Bitstream Vera Sans. Of course Si wouldn't recognize it, being the Microsoftie that he is :)
# Johannes Roessel on Thursday, August 23, 2007 2:49 AM:
Tried WhatTheFont and Identifont and no positive match :(
By the way, Frutiger has nothing to do with fruit :)
# Marc Durdin on Thursday, August 23, 2007 3:02 AM:
The characters look like Prima Sans by Bitstream (http://www.myfonts.com/fonts/bitstream/prima-sans/prima-sans/). I cheated - erase the diacritic marks and it becomes easy to match automatically... :-)
# Nick on Thursday, August 23, 2007 3:41 AM:
Yeah I get the Sixth Sense reference but I second markp in saying I don't get the joke.
# Greg Hewgill on Thursday, August 23, 2007 4:20 AM:
Another fun T-shirt that we made years ago: http://www.cafepress.com/nucleartacos.26746951
I see it's quite similar to the shirt in the first comment!
# Timur Safin on Thursday, August 23, 2007 5:21 AM:
I agree with Marc Durdin - it's most probably Prima Sans with the manually created 'LATIN SMALL LETTER K WITH CEDILLA' (U+0137) which this font doesn't contain.
# Denis on Thursday, August 23, 2007 5:23 AM:
This is Dejavu Sans. Yes, it's a Bitstream Vera Sans derivative with international additions and what not.
ķ isn't in Vera Sans.
The comma below k is a bit off to the right, isn't it?
# Kemp on Thursday, August 23, 2007 5:56 AM:
"looked a bit like Segoe UI except the various dots asre round thered"
I'm trying to figure if that's deliberate =P The whole rest of the post has no mistakes at all that I can spot and then two within three words. Saying that, I've been guilty of the same and I'm sure it will have been on more than one occasion.
# Paul on Thursday, August 23, 2007 7:00 AM:
That, and markp's link above, reminds me of this (which you may or may not already know about): http://www.flickr.com/photos/jedwards/89064330/
# Richard on Thursday, August 23, 2007 7:19 AM:
Appears to be DejaVu Sans.
http://dejavu.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page
(Which is is based on Bitstream's Vera family.)
# Si on Thursday, August 23, 2007 10:44 AM:
Hey, I did suggest Vera to Michael - I demand a recount! ;-)
# Si on Thursday, August 23, 2007 10:46 AM:
And of course Vera is Prima minus the hints.
# Michael S. Kaplan on Friday, August 24, 2007 3:18 AM:
Hey Si,
I was much more impressed in the cases where links to fonts for me to test things out with were made available. :-)
# Ian Griffiths on Monday, September 03, 2007 1:24 AM:
By the way, that font you have that thinks its Helvetica isn't.
The first two lines of your Wordpad document are both showing Arial.
(Arial is often used as an on-screen substitute for Helvetica, presumably because it looks like Helvetica that got into a fight and lost. It is also supposed to have the same character widths.)
# Michael S. Kaplan on Monday, September 03, 2007 2:26 AM:
Ok, I did an updated version that includes an Arial line. The machine has a font installed that claims to be Helvetica?
# Arnt Richard Johansen on Friday, January 25, 2008 4:07 PM:
Glad you liked the shirt, Michael.
I'm a bit amused by all the speculation centered around which font that is. Choosing which font to use is the part of the t-shirt design I put the LEAST amount of thought into.
Denis is correct - it is Dejavu Sans. It was one of the few (or the only?) that satisfied all of my criteria: a) it had to be sans-serif and proportional (readable at a distance); b) it had to include all of the accented characters; and c) it had to be already installed on my GNU/Linux system. Buying a font just to use on a Cafepress shirt? Nuh-uh, I don't think so.
referenced by
2015/07/30 CSI: Typography? aka Not all 8 letter words are the same length....
2008/10/12 I'm not Arial, I'm HEL-𝔉𝔲𝔠𝔨𝔦𝔫𝔤-VETICA, baby!
2008/10/03 Perhaps we can call them live keys? :-)
2008/09/21 The Company Meeting, the interesting science of Forensic Typography, and what happened after
2008/09/10 It is the [unexpected] gratitude from people you respect that makes a [stubborn] Bulldog feels best!
2008/03/19 The forensic typographers found no link to Lucida Console, and the D.A. had nothing to fallback to
2007/09/21 If you had gotten there first, you might have staked your claim too!